1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device, a method, and a computer product which can be used for recording large volumes of data to a recording medium or reproducing large volumes of data recorded on the recording medium, with a magnetic head, thereby increasing the data storage capacity.
2) Description of the Related Art
Recent years have seen a sudden jump in the storage capacity of hard disk drives (HDD), an annual rate exceeding 100%. This trend can be anticipated in the future HDDs as well.
One way of increasing the HDD storage capacity is to increase the number of magnetic disks in the HDD. However, most of the HDDs used in desktop computers are placed in an HDD bay having fixed thickness. Hence, the HDD bay cannot accommodate too many built-in magnetic disks.
Therefore, in the conventional technology, to record large volumes of data on a stand-alone magnetic disk, the storage capacity of the HDD is increased by increasing recording densities such as a linear density, which is the density in the rotation direction of the media, and a track density, which is the density in the radial direction of the track (refer to Chapter 6, Nikkei Byte, “Personal Computer Technical System 2003 Hardware”, Nikkei Byte Co. Ltd.)
However, by increasing the linear density and the track density of the magnetic disk, the storage capacity of the magnetic disk can only be increased to a certain extent, in the conventional technology.
This is because the recording surface per bit of the magnetic disk on which the magnetic head can perform read/write operation, has reached its limit: Reducing the recording surface by further increasing the linear density and the track density results in undesirable yield ratio, and is considerably expensive.
Therefore, it is essential to increase the storage capacity of the magnetic disk without increasing the linear density and the track density.